


Enough to live on

by Solshine



Category: Labyrinth
Genre: Depression, Gen, Happy Ending, Mental Health Issues, Nobody dies don't worry this was a therapy fic, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-14 02:03:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16030709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: Very few things in her life glitter anymore. Maybe this is what growing up is.A fic about Sarah with depression.





	Enough to live on

**Author's Note:**

> A couple years ago, in the midst of a bad bout of depression, I couldn't really write much of anything, so I wrote this. It was about the quality you can expect from a deeply depressed writer, but even though I'm much more stable now, I was suddenly hit with the inspiration to flesh it out and finish it. If it strikes a chord with you too, I hope it makes you feel better.

When Sarah goes to college, something changes.

She couldn't even tell you what, really. All her life school has been pretty easy, if a little boring, so she found refuge from the boredom in books and imagination and magic. People have always told her that she could achieve great things if she just applied herself--even her friends in the Underground told her how full she was of potential.

“Everything thou hast already done is but a fraction of what thou couldst do someday,” Sure Didymus told her once s they strolled along the hedge maze together. Hoggle agreed.

“You got somethin’ big in ya,” he said.

“Like what?” Sarah laughed, and snapped a flowering twig off a tree to tuck into her hair. “Don't suppose you want to put any specifics on these impressive predictions of success?”

“Magic,” Hoggle said firmly. “Ya got magic.”

Sarah looked down at her own hands as though she expected to see something glittering under her skin. 

“Like, real magic?” she said. “Magic magic?”

“A rare gift. Thou must simply learn to control it as thou grows older,” Didymus explained. “Trust thyself and it will come.”

“Sawah magic,” Ludo contributed.

She believed them then. Somehow at the time it made sense, this notion that she could change the world. It was just a given.

It doesn't feel that way anymore. 

Everything is harder than it was when she was younger, in small ways. Not heartbreaks or battles or things you can solve with a stirring monologue; just little tiring things. Just the slow whittling away of energy.

She applies herself. It's not enough.

Everyone always told her that it would be enough.

She stops reading storybooks. She has enough reading for class, too much. Every book she picks up is for a grade now, is something she can fail at. She does fail at it. She never gets enough sleep anymore, and these days that seems more important than once upon a times. 

\--

Late in sophmore year, Sarah forgets how to get to the Labyrinth.

It's been a long time since she tried, she can admit that. She's been busy, been tired. She presses her hand flat against her closer door mirror--not her vanity, that they put in storage when she got her apartment--and it's just a mirror, cool against her hands and reflecting back to her the shadows under her eyes. 

“I need you,” she calls. In the mirror she sees Didymus and Ludo behind her, and she sticks a smile on her face like one of her neon study notes before she turns around.

“Figured we haven't hung out at my place for a while,” she says cheerfully. “Feel like scrambled eggs?”

She feels guilty for forgetting. It doesn't take very long before she stops calling her friends when she needs them because of the way she knows they’ll look at her when she tells them she's lost the magic. A couple of them try to check on her, but the deal was she would call. 

She doesn't call. They stop checking.

“You'll be alright,” says Hoggle the last time she talks to him. “You've got magic.” It doesn't feel like that.

She has a job on the weekends at a coffee house near campus because she wants to rely on her father for as little as possible. It's always busy there, and the college students leave their dirty cups and plates on the table and her boss is demanding and condescending and her coworkers love to gossip about everyone. 

Okay, so people are unkind. That shouldn't matter, but it does. She meets people, human people, who are kind, who try to smile at her and find out what she's thinking.

“Just wondering if you had time to hang out this weekend. I feel like I hardly see you outside class! Call me back!”

“Hey, just checking up. Haven't heard from you for a while, would love to grab a bite. Call me.”

Sarah erases her voicemail. She doesn't call them any more than she does her other friends.

One semester she drops all of her classes just before midterms. She needs a break, she tells her worried father and Karen when they call. She'll take the summer and enroll again next fall. Maybe she can pick up a few more hours at her job, have a little more to fall back on so she doesn't have to work as much during the school year. 

She refuses another offer for them to send her more money. She's supposed to be so full of potential and unrealized success. She's supposed to have magic.

Sarah doesn't go back to college the next semester. She doesn't go back the semester after that either. Even with her textbooks in a stack on the floor by her bed, she still doesn't read any storybooks.

Time passes.

It's such a fucking cliché, but the magic things that she was, that almost were, become things that could've been. That were, once.

Very few things in her life glitter anymore.

Maybe this is what growing up is.

\---

She gets older.

Her apartment is full of those old fairytale books, but she hasn't opened them in a long time. She's working full time at the coffee house now, and when she gets home she's honestly just too tired to read. Sarah buys more books, more books that gather in stacks next to her bookshelves, books such that her old toys, her funny animals, her bronze dwarf bookend, get crowded off the shelves or obscured by detritus. It seems like there’s always driftwood and beach glass of her life everywhere, receipts and dirty forks and junk mail and mugs with tree rings of evaporated tea burnishing the inside of them. 

She doesn't read the new books either. Sometimes she comes through and gathers up the junk mail and dirty dishes. The mail she throws away; the dishes she piles in the sink, an impossible mountain with an embarrassing smell. Somehow it’s been like that forever, as though it’s been the same stack of dishes all this time. She means to do more, to sort the books she doesn't read or put away the things that are just taking up space, or just empty the fucking sink, but it always seems like she's so tired, and there's so much to do that starting on it seems impossible, and what little she does do never sticks.

If she had a clean apartment, she could start over, free of these past couple years of stagnation. She feels certain of that.

At the very least, there would be less hiding places for the shadows that flicker in the corners of her eyes and chitter just under the sound of the vents or the water heater.

\---

One night, she has a dream.

In it someone pale and misty around the edges lays his long cool hands hands over hers and says something in a deep, lyrical voice that she almost understands. 

She forces herself awake, and lies in bed, breathing hard in the dark.

She doesn't go back to sleep.

She doesn't sleep the next night either, just stays up all night watching documentaries on Netflix. Realistic things, about machines and wars and censuses, nothing that glitters, nothing fantastical or strange. The night after that, she takes a little more than the recommended dose of NyQuil and sleeps dreamlessly until noon. She wakes up tired anyway.

\---

The shadows and the chitters, if anything, become more insistent now.

The dreams, of someone just seen out of the edge of her eye colored like jewels and white gold, keep showing up if Sarah isn't vigilant, if she doesn't wear herself out and then pop a Benadryl before bed. She's tired at work--she's tired all the time, deep, heavy, bone-aching tired--but it's only slinging coffee for a bullshit hourly wage. Her performance not being stellar is hardly the end of the world. (Try telling that to her boss, of course.) She doesn't answer the phone when it rings, just sends back apologetic texts about being busy. She doesn't look in mirrors.

When she was fourteen, when she had magic friends and could step between worlds with a thought and had triumphed over a fairy King and sent his castle toppling, she thought maybe someday she'd be an author, or an actress, or a teacher, or maybe a powerful sorceress.

That's not how it worked out, though.

\---

She falls asleep in front of a World War One documentary.

The cool hands wrap tightly around her fingers and the voice says her name, like you'd say the name of someone in a coma before you believe the doctors telling you it won't do any good. “Sarah?”

On the couch, her body contracts in on itself. She buries herself deeper in sleep and darkness, and her hands slip out of the others.

\---

She eats leftover mac and cheese from the refrigerator, cold and sticky, without warming it up. There is nothing else in the refrigerator to eat, except for the ingredients to more mac and cheese. What has she been eating for breakfast? She hasn't been eating breakfast, she realizes. She can't have been. The days are fuzzy, though.

“How long has it been this bad?” she asks out loud to her refrigerator, but is struck by a sudden terror that something, those burbling shadows, maybe, might answer her back, so she turns on some music as quickly as she can and cranks it up, starts piling her dirty mac and cheese dishes as clankingly as possible.

It isn't the fear of the voice, really, the way some people might feel about a mysterious voice from their empty apartment. It's the certainty that she doesn't want to hear the answer to her question.

\---

She drives her tired old car fast, to and from her job and the grocery store and nowhere, really, sometimes, just driving to drive. It isn't that she's hoping she’ll crash.

(Is it?)

It's just that it's almost like feeling something, when she drives very fast. She turns the music up so loud it reverberates in her ribs and she rolls the windows down, and lets the wind flap her dark hair like a flag and she ignores the feeling of something chasing, almost catching her bumper.

She wishes it would.

Sarah drives faster.

\---

One day at work she drops a pot of coffee and two mugs. The second one breaks and when she tries to clean it up she cuts her hand and bleeds all over her apron. Her boss sends her home early with a sour look on their face.

She's almost out of toilet paper, so she stops at the grocery store. She should probably get some butterfly bandages for her hand too.

Instead, she stops in the produce section, her eye caught by a basket stacked neatly with golden peaches, rosy in the curve of them, looking sweet and soft to the fingertip. She stares at them, and squeezes the fistful of dishrag wrapped around her palm. Her hand hurts.

She buys one, and goes home without the toilet paper or the bandages.

At home, Sarah drops her purse by the door and herself heavily onto the couch. She looks at the peach, held in her hand that isn't wrapped in dishrag. She doesn't know how long she sits there, staring at it. She doesn't move at all, can barely feel herself blinking. She thinks maybe she's come unmoored behind her eyes, beneath her skin, that all the infinite tiny strings inside her that connect her to her body, to her fingers, her face, her organs, have all dissolved or rotted away and left her floating inside, somewhere. Floating like a bubble.

Sarah closes her eyes, and takes a bite.

\---

“What, dear child, were you hoping to forget?”

She opens her eyes. Mismatched ones meet hers.

“I'm not sure I had that much of a plan in mind,” Sarah admits.

They are in the throne room that she passed through in her way through the castle the first time, although neither of them are sitting on the throne. Instead they are both seated on the low ring of stone, angled toward each other. It is as empty as when she first saw it, quiet and cool as though it is very early morning here.

“If you wish to forget,” Jareth says, “I can arrange it. You can go back to the crystal ballroom, if you wish.” She can't help but snort, and a smirk twitches on his face. “Or anywhere else, if the teenage fantasy hasn't aged well.”

“For what price?” she demands. It's been years since she read a fairy tale, but she remembers the rules. Yet Jareth only shakes his head.

“I do not like to see you suffer,” he answers. “I have often tried to reach you, as have your friends, but you have not made it easy.”

She's struck by a pang of guilt, thinking of Hoggle and Didymus and Ludo looking out from the mirrors she's been avoiding. She thought they gave up on her.

“Yeah, well, when have I ever,” she mutters. He is not white gold and misty edges now--she does not remember, from her girlhood, him being so real. He sits in front of her, doublet and hose and impossible hair notwithstanding, and he is just a person. Arms, legs, fingernails. Solid.

The look on his face suddenly makes her think of all those ignored voicemails, the invitations unanswered, before her Aboveground friends decided she didn't want to be checked up on. Sarah thinks maybe this really doesn't have to do with fairy tale bargains after all.

“Or,” says Jareth quietly, “if you prefer, you can sleep, no dreams necessary. As long as you like. Forever, if that's what you want. Like Snow White, with a minor change of fruit.” 

There is a rush of longing within her. Yes, that's what she wants, that's what she's always wanting. She doesn't want to drink poison, for god's sake, she just wants to rest.

“If there's pain back there,” Jareth says, “you don't have to go back to it.”

 _I don't like to see you suffer,_ he said. She thinks of long nights in her dark cluttered apartment, lit by nothing but the glow of her laptop. Suffering seems the wrong word. She's just tired. And the pain, or whatever it is, isn't back there, in the human world, anyway. It's in her, something in her own heart. 

“Can you fix me?” she says.

“I’m afraid my specialty is in illusion,” he answers, propping his elbows on his knees. “Healing is a uniquely human talent.”

She rolls her eyes and looks at the stonework of the floor. “It might be a human talent,” she says, “but not one of mine.”

“Of course it is,” says Jareth immediately. Sarah raises a skeptical eyebrow at him.

“Have you _seen_ my life?”

“A remarkable life,” is his answer, straightening up again. She scoffs. “Sarah Williams’s life,” he adds, “and therefore by nature remarkable. The fault in the picture you are painting lies in, shall we say, the brush, and not the subject.”

She throws her hands up. "Well, it's the only brush I've got.”

He tilts his head, considering her. That pale, dawnlike light catches his hair and turns it nearly white. "You told me once,” he says thoughtfully, “that was your will was a strong as mine and your kingdom as great.”

Sarah pulls her feet up and folds her arms over her knees. "A long time ago.”

"No,” he says, almost sharply. She looks back over at him, surprised. “Now. Nothing has changed. Potential runs through you like veins of gold through a mine, Sarah.” He sighs and stands, taking a few steps away and turning toward a window. “I understand if you wish for oblivion,” he says, with his back to her. “I understand if trying seems too difficult. But do not convince yourself first that trying would have been pointless.”

She still has the peach in her hand. She hugs her knees with her other arm and looks at it, and remembers the green worm crawling out of the other one.

“I don't know where to start,” she says in a small voice.

Jareth looks back over his shoulder and smiles. He beckons her with his fingers and starts walking over to the arched window.

"You've always had magic," he says. “You've been running from it for years, but it's always been there.”

Sarah gets up and follows him. "I stopped being able to get into the Labyrinth," she insists. He shakes his head.

“You only forgot," he replies. "You could've asked.”

"When you say I have magic…" she says slowly.

Jareth laughs, pleased and loud, and steps out of the way so that she can get to the window.

“It isn't a metaphor,” he says. "But it will take practice."

She looks at her own hands, but she doesn't know what she expects to see. “Hoggle said I did,” she says. “And Didymus. I think I used to believe them.”

She steps up to look out the window and rests her unoccupied hand on the stone edge.

"It's my street," she says, with more surprise than perhaps she ought to feel. The sun is going down here, unlike in the castle beyond the goblin city, and the neighborhood is painted ochre red. Jareth’s hands rest on her shoulders, warm and heavy, and she only startles a little.

“You can bring magic to this world,” he says, almost in her ear. She doesn't spin around to face him, but she can feel without looking that they're in her apartment. She runs her fingers over the wooden windowsill. “Its own magic, not borrowed or copied. A valuable gift.”

“Magic,” she repeats, just to taste the word again. It still doesn't feel true, but the view from inside her battered heart allows very little to be true. She does not believe Jareth would lie to her. She wants to believe this. She is willing to try.

“It will not be easy,” he says.

“And time is short?” Sarah suggests.

“No, Sarah,” he murmurs into her hair. “There is always time enough to make a change.”

When she turns around, he is gone. She stands alone in her close, dusty living room, darkening in the evening light. But in her hand, instead of a peach, is a crystal sphere.

First things first. She places the sphere gently on the coffee table. 

“Come on, feet,” she says, and walks into the kitchen to bandage her hand and start washing the dishes.


End file.
